See also: last week's Letters page.

Letters to the editor

From:	 Rainer Weikusat <weikusat@mail.uni-mainz.de>
To:	 letters@lwn.net
Subject: Thieves 'r' us
Date:	 21 Apr 2001 13:09:19 +0200


        Technologies that empower people don't discriminate between
        good uses and bad. So if we build constraints into our
        computer systems that prevent infringement, we're also making
        it impossible for users to engage in all sorts of lawful
        copying.

Why does nobody 'get that' that's exactly what the entertainment
industry probably wants: _Prohibit lawful copying_. 'Infringement'
will be done by your friendly Hongkong-based clonemaker anyway.

-- 
SIGSTOP

From:	 FB <fbochicchio@galactica.it>
To:	 letters@lwn.net
Subject: About the new italian law on news publishing
Date:	 Thu, 19 Apr 2001 22:42:45 +0200


Dear LWN editors,

I am a constant reader of your net magazine, and usually find your coverage
of linux-related news quite precise and informative.

I am also among the 35000 people that signed the petition against the new
italian law on news publishing; therefore I was pleased that LWN reported
this italian misadventure in the front page of the last issue.

While the coverage of this item was generally good, considering that it
was strictly (and unfortunately tipical) italian, in my opinion you
should have avoided the final comment about italian politics.

The way you put it ( or at least the way I read it ) it seems that the
approval of the law is somehow related to the fact that the new Italian
Prime Minister could be the owner of the major private italian TV network.

While I may share some of the expressed concerns, like the fact that the
future italian prime minister may have too much power over the italian
media, this is unrelated with the approval of the law: the law was voted by
both gouvernment parties and opposition parties (except a couple of small
ones), and the current gouvernment, which prepared the law, is opposed by
the party lead by Mr. Berlusconi ( the TV network owner ).

The reason behind the law is, IMO, that few in Italy percieve the
revolutionary potential of the Net ( and of these fews, some are maybe
scared by it ).

Regards.
Francesco Bochicchio

From:	 Gary Shears
To:	 letters@lwn.net
Subject: backdoors in open source
Date:	 Thu, 19 Apr 2001 10:13:46 -0500

Regarding these paragraphs on your This Week in Linux History page for
April 19, 2001.

> Webmasters all over the world are going to be pulling all-nighters and
> tearing their hair out over this one. That is, webmasters who are unlucky
> enough to work for bosses who bought Microsoft. At the over 60% of sites
> running the open-source Apache webserver, webmasters will be kicking back
> and smiling -- because they know that Apache will *never* have a back door
> like this one.
>
> "Never" was, perhaps, a bit strong. There have been a couple of "back
> door" issues with free software recently, but they tend to be the sort of
> exception that provies the rule. Consider, for example, the back door
> found in InterBase shortly after the code was released.

I can't agree completely with your assessment that 'never' was too strong a
word to use, especially given the example you cite. The backdoor in
Interbase was put in place when the product was proprietary, and was
discovered after the code was released, and only because the code was
released.  Yes, it is possible that a back door can be placed in open
source code. However, it is highly unlikely that it would go unnoticed and
uncorrected for six years, as was the case with Interbase. If I recall
correctly, tcpwrapper was trojaned several years ago. This was discovered
and corrected within hours.  Also, a backdoor such as the one in Interbase
(a hardcoded user and password, to allow two parts of the program to
communicate) would never have passed muster in the open source world. It's
just poor programming practice.  I believe that such a backdoor will
*never* enter the apache tree.

Gary Shears

From:	 Mark Christensen <mchristensen@HTEC.com>
To:	 "'letters@lwn.net'" <letters@lwn.net>
Subject: Google data
Date:	 Mon, 23 Apr 2001 12:02:08 -0400

Though I don't attribute much significance to the fact that SourceForge has
more references on the internet than Beer -- at least as cataloged by Google
-- your report did get me thinking. 

What can we really learn about the state of the free software world from
looking at Google's data?  

So I did a couple of Free Software/ Open Source searches and tabulated the
data.

172,000	"Free Software" AND "Open Source"
1,410,000	"Free Software"
2,430,000	"Open Source"
3,120,000 	Beer
3,570,000 	SourceForge
36,500,000	Linux
38,600,000	Porn 
53,100,000	Software

The first thing I noticed is that the references to free software and open
source combined are an order of magnitude less than the references to Linux.
This seems to indicate a significant disparity between the popularity of
Linux and any knowledge of the philosophies behind the movement that created
it.  

Another thing to notice is that only a small number of page include
references to both RMS's "Free Software," and ESR's "Open Source."
Moreover, almost twice as many pages use the Open Source designation
exclusively. This seems to indicate that there is some real disagreement
about which term to use, and the Open source people seem to have been a
somewhat more effective in advocating their particular rhetoric, and
associated philosophy.  

Another somewhat surprising piece of information is that Linux trails only
slightly behind Porn in number of page references on Google. 

I'm not sure we should take any of this data too seriously, but it is
interesting to think about what we could learn from this kind of data. 

I once was part of a cultural anthropology project which analyzed writings
on bathroom walls.  We broke the data down into a variety of categories, and
then by the gender, economic status, and age of the author.  It's surprising
what we learned about gender and class differences in the US from this
relatively simple study.  I'm sure some motivated college students with more
free time and energy could pull some really interesting data out of the
Google statistics.

Yours
Mark

From:	 George M. Sipe
To:	 editor@lwn.net
Subject: applications available on Linux
Date:	 Thu, 19 Apr 2001 21:30:31 -0400

Your On The Desktop piece this week bemoaned the lack of adequate tax
preparation software for Linux.  For many users, this is certainly true
of available native software.  However there are good alternatives in
Windows software running under Win4Lin or VMware.

I run Linux 24 hours/day and have done so for many years.  In the past I
had to reboot to Windows to run applications which simply did not have
acceptable Linux counterparts.  This was not convenient and interfered
with various functions I run under Linux - but there just wasn't a
reasonable option.  Some years back I bought Wabi and it helped, but it was
limited.  I have tried wine but it is even more limited (but improving).

Win4Lin (which I use) and VMware (which I understand to also be quite
good) solve this problem.  These are enablers for Linux on the desktop.
Most people are not willing to boot back and forth and since Linux
currently can't do everything they need, Linux is not be used.

These products do not get nearly the attention they deserve in the Linux
community.  I assume that is because (1) they are commercial and (2) they
implicitly acknowledge the continuing need for at least some Windows
software.  That's a shame, because they greatly expand the application
base and are also an excellent bridge to Linux for Windows users.

From:	 "M Clasquin" <CLASQM@unisa.ac.za>
To:	 <letters@lwn.net>
Subject: M Carling wrote:
Date:	 Tue, 24 Apr 2001 11:45:03 +0200

M Carling wrote:

>Bonobos and humans are the only mammals that can mate face to face.


Not so, porcupines have also evolved this ability, though their motives are
painfully obvious ...